This is a blast from the past. One of the very first portable digital cameras that I tested for Kodak, Nikon, and the Associated Press from 1992-1994. They claimed it was the second one built when two guys flew out to hand deliver it in the fall of 1994. This shot is from August 1996. The Associated Press wrote the Photoshop "acquire plugin" for dealing with the compressed tif format that the camera used. Good color was quite often very problematic, but the 16 bit grayscale (here downsampled to 8bit) still looks good to me.
Thanks Derek. This camera saved me a lot of time, and allowed more time to shoot. The camera could be disassembled with a coin and removing a single 4" screw. Brilliant design in IMO.
Dneufarth wrote:
Very cool story, and a great image.
Really great shot and story. Honestly I never imagined that there were DSLR cameras in existence in 1994, but honestly that's naive thinking the more I think about it.
I ran two Nikon F3HP film cameras (one loaded with Fuji transparency, and one with Tri-X), and digital cameras - when one day they asked me to go pick up supplies - since editorial and marketing shared the studio and labs. I went to pick up the supplies from a local brick and mortar camera store in March of 1989, and played with a new Canon video camera that also shot 320 x 240 pixel still photos - the penny dropped. I instantly knew it would be just a matter of time that they would scale the sensor size, and apply it to still cameras. I was really excited, and immediately started writing "reports" about why we needed this technology at the paper, and it would save money. Within a few months I was testing prototypes until the Kodak/Nikon/AP effort became the sole supplier of equipment for me to test and report about.
No one company wanted to foot the bill to make the first professional portable camera (the NC2000). Hence the Kodak/Nikon/AP joint effort. There were interesting reasons back then. A typical Thursday for me was to print for 8 hours straight, and I was sick of it. I also didn't like film scanning, because it was slow to digitize analog film. Plus I got lucky being a squeaky wheel, because the editorial photogs already had an analog way of doing everything, and were not interested in learning a new method. I was in marketing and producing a volume of published photos that dwarfed the editorial departments total output in numbers of photos and column inches of space (and my photos were paid space). According to AP tech support guy at the paper - resistance by editorial newspaper photographers to the new digital cameras was almost universal.
Whoa...did I get off track
Jim
DanielScott wrote:
Really great shot and story. Honestly I never imagined that there were DSLR cameras in existence in 1994, but honestly that's naive thinking the more I think about it.
Seny,
It was very expensive. Apparently there were only about 500 NC2000-AP, IR, and other later versions ever made. Editorial was forced to adopt the Nikon D2h at the paper I worked at in 2003, but I was already using the D1X at that point. Seems memories will have to do - even Rob Galbraith Digital Photography's website has been removed from the web for over 10 years now...had an excellent NC2000 review.
Jim
Seny wrote:
Good contrast for an early digital camera. I remember the camera was very expensive back in the newspaper days.
Thanks for bringing back old memories.
